Blue
by AmberPalette
Summary: In which all three Slayers canon couples Lina/Gourry, Zelgadiss/Amelia, Xelloss/Filia break up, realize through humorous and poignant situations that a soul mate is worth fighting for, and reconcile. Slightly XelFi-centric.
1. BreakUp

**Blue  
A Slayers Fanficlet  
By A. Stitt**

_IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:_

Slayers is the property of Hajime Kanzaka and Rui Araizumi. This fanfiction contains character references from all three seasons of the Slayers anime, as well as from the Slayers manga.

This serves two purposes for the author: first, to have fun, as it is fanfiction and not serious writing.

Secondly, I challenge myself to imagine a world in which characters deviate from canon romantic pairings, if only briefly. After noting that I was the only person without the courage to entertain the idea, I deliberately forced myself to attack my favorite canon pairing: Xellos Metallium and Filia Ul Copt. Several of my fellow Slayers fans have remarked upon alternate pairings for Filia. The most outlandish and WRONG alternate pairing I have ever heard of is Filia and Zelgadiss. It has no contextual evidence and the characters have no romantic chemistry (sorry, AU lovers). So, challenge-whore that I am, I am going to write them, LOL.

The story features Xellos's reactions, and the various poignant moments during which absence not only makes the heart grow fonder, but also proves to us that we have found, and need to fight for, our soul mate. Fellow Xellos and Filia shippers, be warned—you may find parts of this story depressing. But be of cheer—all is restored to its RIGHTFUL place in the end.

PART 1

"And is he dark enough?  
Enough to see your light?  
And do you brush your teeth before you kiss?  
Do you miss my smell?  
And is he bold enough to take you on?  
Do you feel like you belong?  
And does he drive you wild?  
Or just mildly free?

What about me?

Well I know I make you cry  
And I know sometimes you wanna die  
But do you really feel alive  
Without me?  
If so: be free.  
If not: leave him for me.  
Before one of us has accidental babies.  
For we are in love.  
We are in love.

What about me?  
What about me?  
What about  
Me?"  
--Damien Rice

Blue. She always wears pink, always insists on her delicate, lacey, bone-china teacup femininity.  
But he knows her better.  
Blue is her color, it is sturdy, it heals, it is like flowing feeling mysterious currents of water, and honeysuckle is her smell. It's in her pores.  
She has always told him that rain and cinnamon are his smells. Rain like that faint earthy-wet aroma right before a thunderstorm, when the protons and electrons in the air dance in electric anticipation. She once added that he reminds her of lightning, of fireflies, and of those beautiful weeds called dandelions. All gorgeous, all alluring, all enigmas. Respectively, they are: lethal; wistfully childlike; and irritatingly persistent.  
He told her that her hair was like dandelions, the same color, and then he kissed it over and over, and laughed, his white demon fangs flashing, when she blushed the hue of June rose petals.  
Maybe it is because rain reminds her of him that he gets vindictive pleasure out of knowing that there is a deluge today—the day someone else is taking her on a date. A picnic.  
He gags. He never liked those. He hates the color pink. He hates maces and vases, and tea, and her burned cooking, and her stupid snorting giggle behind her hand, and her twenty pairs of gardening gloves, and her forty Victorian-era gardening hats, and her way of singing off-pitch lullabies to her son Valteira, the reborn ancient dragon…  
And he hates how he misses Val like Val is his own son.  
And he hates how he misses her, and he hates that she is so beautiful, so beautiful that it is like someone stuck a livewire down his belly and electrocuted him the first time he looked at her, even though he is supposed to be a monster, a demon, an unfeeling and selfish professional assassin, a priest and general of the ma-oh that opposes the shinzoku she serves…  
He hates that he adores Filia Ul Copt and everything that he just now pretended to himself that he hates.  
"There's only room for one of us," Xellos Metallium, the most powerful mazoku shy of the three remaining monster lords themselves, sits sopping wet and darkly brooding on the roof of the dragon priestess Filia Ul Copt's cottage.  
He could easily erect himself a force field around the rain. But it's his ally right now. His ally against that abomination made of rocks, that somehow caught her eye.  
He leans over the pediments and peers inside the second-floor cottage window. There is a vase of crunchy brown flowers still poised on the table beside her bed. Their bed. Dead flowers—she can't move herself to throw them away.  
He picked her those flowers—dusty silver-lavender roses. He meticulously removed every thorn. Except one that he had missed, near the bloom—and on that thorn Filia had pricked her finger. Xellos had snickered and sighed, placing that finger between his lips. He had suckled the blood gently dry. Then he had lovingly chastised her not to grab at beautiful and dangerous things so impulsively.  
He might have held his tongue if he had realized he was talking about himself, as well.  
The puncture became a little infected the following week. Xellos wonders, now, if Filia took his words too closely to heart.  
But the flowers that pricked Filia's eager finger are still there beside their bed. The fact remains.  
The rain changes to sleet, but Xellos doesn't feel a thing.

It happened a month ago—the reason why Xellos sits out in the rain on Filia's roof, instead of bundled up in her warm soft arms, head nestled between her breasts, with the scent of honeysuckle in his nose.  
Just another argument. But something much more profound at the same time.  
Filia had quixotically decided to plant several hundred chrysanthemums in her back garden. There was a void space, fertile soil gone to waste, in the upper left corner of the back lot. To Filia, a master gardener, this was sinful.  
So she enlisted the most sinful person she knew to rectify the situation: Xellos, who could do virtually anything conceivable to mortals, except cook or garden.  
Filia's was a strange logic indeed.  
However Xellos, whom Filia had ensnared on his way between pillaging, deceit, or theft on behalf of his maker, the Greater Beast, was in a receptive mood. A receptive mood for Xellos entailed an openness to all things pointless, nonsensical, and eccentric.  
Therefore he was enthusiastic about the chance to cake his glorious silk priest robes with dirt digging a hundred holes and filling them with a hundred plants.  
A perfect companion to Filia's "logic" was Xellos's jovial will to entertain insanity.  
Although, Xellos was probably—no, indubitably—insane as well. It was a nice setup.  
Nevertheless, he enjoyed playfully needling his beloved girlfriend, making casual remarks about how squirrels, gophers, and chipmunks enjoyed the piquant after-dinner flavor of mum blossoms. Oh yes, and deer, too. And by the way, did Filia know that hibernation, for all these animals, was at least two months away?  
Filia ignored her lover's cheerful sarcasm with aplomb—usually, she took a swing at him with her mace, or loudly insulted his mother. She was in a good mood today—frankly she adored Xellos with all her heart and soul, and he was with her doing her favorite pastime in the world, for her happiness.

Life was good. And unequivocal happiness made Filia, an Aries if ever there was one, myopic and reckless. And when Filia was myopic and reckless, it usually became rude and blunt. And when she was rude and blunt, it made Xellos, a Gemini if ever there was one, evasive and verbally cutting.  
Thus:

The dragoness hauled out a tray of twelve mums while openly gazing at her demon's perfectly crafted physique. She plopped them down on the grass near the empty plot where he labored. She tried to be quiet while she watched him work. His shirt was removed and all he wore were his baggy black priest's pants and high, slender brown boots. His shoulder blades were like two scythe-tips, dipping in and out of his gently tanned olive flesh as he dug precise little holes in the earth. His spine, just barely visible, coiled and uncoiled like a lithe serpent, his arms, neither flimsy nor bulging, moving rhythmically and harmoniously with the whole of his form. And the back of his neck was candied with sweatbeads, and a few tempting strands of his velvety dark purple hair slivered out of his short ponytail like shredded iris petals.  
Oh gods. She adored him.  
Filia did not realize that her lips were less than an inch from the back of that absurdly seductive neck until a smoky chuckle emanated from the throat inside it. "Filia," said the head sitting on top of that neck, "if you distract me this successfully from my planting, it will never get done." Damn! Reverse psychology! That voice was coy and irritatingly nasal and also somehow quite satiny, and it made her want to smack and kiss its owner simultaneously.  
She had actually managed this many times.  
"Sorry," the dragoness quipped, voice shaking only slightly. She sat back on her haunches in the dirt. "I didn't mean to be such a bother." Her mouth wriggled in a helpless attempt not to giggle.  
Xellos lashed around with the silent, oily grace of an eel. His grin, dimpled and fanged, was both boyish and profane. "I wouldn't call you a bother, precisely…" He lunged at her, pinning her down like a puppy pins its favorite playmate. "Lunch break?" he purred, face imploring.  
Filia's breathing hastened. "No," she finally decided, her hedonistic self hating her industrious self. "Later. Tonight. Val might see us now. And anyway you've only planted thirty mums so far."  
"Oh, pooh. Very well." He sat up, cross-legged, hand cupping his chin. He of course didn't offer her a hand up.  
Filia rolled her eyes and helped herself to a sitting position. There was a pause while Xellos sat there mulling over the secrets of the universe.  
"DID YOU KNOW…?" he abruptly burst out, eyes gleaming eagerly. Xellos was a windbag and generally loved teaching at people.  
"Probably," Filia grinned, in an attempt to take the wind out of his sails.  
"Oh, shut up." It worked. He pouted. "Let me pretend to know something that matters to you."  
Her heart melted, damn him. "Aw." She got slowly to her feet, and kissed his perfect forehead through his pageboy bangs. This was always her quelling gesture for Xellos—it extracted from him a sweet and abashed little smile, the kind of smile that she only saw from him, otherwise, when he was sleeping. "Go on," she said, just as he flashed that exact adorable expression at her.  
Damn him!  
"WELL," he prattled, chest puffed out and steam regained, "chrysanthemums are symbolically related to many things, chief among them motherhood. That is why we call our mothers 'mum,' heeehehe!" A high-pitched, frantic giggle followed this proclamation. Xellos's laughter, when he was most acutely amused, was an acquired taste to listeners. It smacked of a homicidal clown who had inhaled helium.  
"I see. Very interesting." Filia ran her fingers fondly through her happy sage's hair as she passed him in pursuit of the next flat of mums. "I don't think my mother and I are on good enough terms for that nickname, though."  
"I suppose." His voice had changed, and she cursed herself inwardly for leaving herself so wide open to his voracious curiosity. No going back now. "Filia, I know a lot about your mother, but you have never spoken of your father. Yet your new Supreme Elder, Milgasia, speaks often of him with reverence. Who was he?"  
Filia felt her skin going clammy. She tightened and released her fists several times before turning to face him. His visage was insufferably pleasant and piqued. She wanted to punch him for being so impassive about his own nosiness. "Bazard Ul Copt was the Supreme Elder before Milgasia. During the Darkstar Campaign."  
In the silence that followed, a feather hitting snow could have been heard.  
The weirdest look came over Xellos's face in the duration. Somewhere between constipated and shocked. But Xellos was the most brilliant person Filia had ever known, and even an idiot could put together what she had just confessed.  
Finally he spoke. "Bazard Ul Copt was your father. Yes?"  
"Yes." She shut her eyes.  
"The Supreme Elder, before Milgasia, was named Bazard." He spread wide his mud-covered palms.  
"…yes."  
"Filia. I may be making logical leaps here, but…"  
"Yes, the Supreme Elder was my father." She uttered it through tight, white lips. "He kept it secret so that I would not find favoritism by any means but personal merit while training to become a shrine maiden of Ceiphied. We didn't even speak as father and daughter in private, for fear of falling out of practice and unveiling the sham."  
Xellos dropped his gardening trowel and shot to his feet. He made a twisting, dancelike motion with his torso, bobbing his head thrice rhythmically. The effect was supposed to be exasperation, but it only came off as something slick and slightly effeminate. "What a charade. In other circumstances I might salute you for the refined deceit. But seven hells, Filly! You might have told me at the time…"  
"Might have told you what?" Filia attempted coldness and only managed sulkiness. "I hardly think it would have made any difference during the Darkstar Campaign. Your consideration of my feelings would take the back burner to your beloved Beastmaster's agenda…"  
This last remark struck a deepest and most sensitive chord.  
"Now, wait a moment…!" Xellos's eyes went from amethyst to magenta.  
"No!" Filia went on with the intrepid roar of a bulldozer, reckless in her sullenness. She turned her back on Xellos, raising a small, pale, childlike hand as though in the throes of a spiritual testimony. "You'd still have tried to kill my father for getting between you and your goal. I'm sure of it. I was sure of it then. So I've never told you." Her palm smacked the cottage wall with a cruel finality.  
A pregnant silence ensued, one which the dragoness knew well to be the eye of one of Xellos's rare but formidable temper-storms.  
"And that's your problem," came his impossibly cold voice, arctic and soft, a bewildering hybrid of snake hiss and dove croon, each word crisply enunciated. "You're always unequivocally sure of your expertise on everything. Including my intentions. My character. My hazardously high regard for you. Even my very worth."  
"Those," she snarled, spinning on like a dervish, "are hefty accusations coming from a mass murderer. How arrogant of you, Xellos." The triumphant flush of her cheeks should have made her more beautiful than ever, but it did not.  
"I see. You're resorting to that infantile tactic of defense by offense." He smiled—the look was condescending, and decidedly malicious.  
It was a look he had cast many victims in his long lifetime, but never Filia, who was spared more vitriol at her lover's hands than she would ever know.  
But Xellos had already hit his red zone this time. Now all he meant to do was draw her into the kind of blind rage that complemented his cool, cerebral character, that slaked his appetite for the chaos and passion of which he was not personally capable, but which he ever craved. He continued in that purr which grew exponentially more like a hiss with every syllable: "Don't gawk at me like some constipated toddler. You who felt guilty over what your race had done to Val…and I consoled you and promised you that you had NO culpability in what your race did…because I already KNOW that I'm not one to judge ANYBODY, considering my OWN sins…and still, to WIN an argument, to never say 'I'M SORRY, XELLOS, I WAS WRONG,' You—YOU! How inconceivable of you, Filly! Sure, you're STUBBORN, but THIS…"  
"DON'T CALL ME FILLY WHEN I'M MAD AT YOU!" Now she was screaming, and threatening to shatter the decibel scale while she was at it.  
"Oh, DO pardon me, FIL-I-A. I can sleep with you, raise your child with you, and live with you monogamously for every expected eternity, but I can't call you 'Filly' when you're mad, gods no. And don't leave my staff in the bathroom. And don't tell your first-time customers I'm not a human. And on and on and ON! The rules must be abided by, regardless of their arbitrariness…" He took a step towards her, trampling a mum underfoot. Neither of them noticed.  
"You are so revolting when you're sarcastic!" She threw a bag of wet clay found against the cottage wall at him.  
He dodged it effortlessly. "You certainly have a long list of conditions by which I revolt you. What are you, a glutton for punishment? If I'm so sickening, why is it you want ME and no one else?"  
A moment passed before Filia's shocked face tightened into an angry leer. "What a compelling question," she growled, through smiling dragon fangs. "Maybe I should go window shopping."  
His left eye twitched closed, then pried back open. "You can't be serious."  
"Oh, I am. Believe me, I am. No matter how appealing this stormy relationship of ours is…"  
"FILIA, do you have ANY concept of how much I've given up, just to…"  
"I'm tired of listening to you bemoaning how cursed you are by falling in love with a dragon…"  
"I NEVER said…"  
"Oh YES, you did! I'm TIRED of you disappearing for weeks on end because Zelas Metallium suddenly has somebody for you to kill or some place for you to blow up or some perverse greed for some dark object you have to retrieve, like some DOG. I'm TIRED of Val having to explain to his classmates that his daddy isn't really a 'bad' person, he's just part of a species called 'evil race.' I'm TIRED of you laughing at me when I act naïve, or clumsy, or impulsive! That's WHO I AM!"  
"I KNOW THAT." Xellos pounced the silence following this flow of vicious complaints, face spectrally pale. He hardly knew how to shout, but his voice jumped an octave above his normal pitch, taut and reedy and sing-songy: "And if I didn't find those flaws endearing and appealing and WONDERFUL, Filia, I would have LEFT you!"  
"I DON'T THINK SO, XELLOS!"  
"OF COURSE YOU DON'T, AND THAT'S ALL THAT MATTERS, RIGHT? WHAT YOU THINK! WHAT YOU THINK IS THE ONLY TRUTH THAT EXISTS, RIGHT?"  
"NO, ALL THAT MATTERS IN THIS RELATIONSHIP IS WHAT KEEPS YOU, A SICK SELFISH PUPPETMASTER, ENTERTAINED LONG ENOUGH!"  
"Aw, FILIA…!"  
"YOU'RE SO DAMNED SELFISH, XELLOS, THAT I SWEAR, EVEN IF IT WOULD SAVE MY LIFE, YOU WOULDN'T CONDESCEND TO GET A HAIRCUT FOR ME!" She flicked her wrist at his head of neat, glossy, hypnotically beautiful purple hair, sending some poetically strayed strands flopping over his eyes.  
"Tuh!" He sputtered and fumed, lashing the hair out of his line of vision. "Are you REALLY so delusional?" His arms trembled at his sides. He swallowed loudly, as though to keep countless violent urges in check.  
It was perhaps incalculably fortunate for both of them that Xellos was a master of self-control.  
"If you want to define this as delusion, then yes." Filia's chest panged as she said it, but she was too proud to take back her words now.  
"And you're really that eager to go 'window shopping'?" Now he was strangely calm, his features placid.  
"Yes."  
For the briefest instant, Xellos flinched. Then it passed, and he stepped back from Filia, whom he had been prepared to deeply kiss, whom he had perhaps taken a bit too much for granted, this time.  
His scent, like earth after rain, and sandalwood, and citrus, and candy corn, faded.  
Filia almost gave in when that smell dissipated in the air. Almost. But she didn't budge. Not visibly.  
Xellos turned serenely away from Filia.  
Amazing how two parts of one soul can somehow be rent apart so softly.  
He spoke as though it were a benediction: "Very well. You got your wish. Just don't fall through the glass window leaning in looking. Because no one else is going to clean up your messes and still hold you. And, Filia, because no one knows you as I do, I am going to ask you NOT to do what I KNOW you will do: Don't start blubbering and calling my name five minutes after I'm gone, or tonight when you're in bed alone, or tomorrow when I'm not here for breakfast or to walk Val to school…"  
Rage and grief flooded Filia, jolting her from her anesthetic stupor. Suddenly the reality of what she had stupidly and frivolously suggested, and the damage it had done, hit her like a tsunami wave. She exploded, "ARE YOU DUMPING ME—?"  
"Or ever again." The snide impassivity with which he spoke those last three words was remarkably painful to their recipient.  
Filia's eyes spilled over torrentially as Xellos smiled—smiled through his own agony—and vanished from her cottage, and did not return for some time.

Xellos's mouth twitches and he rears upright on the sodden roof, as Zelgadiss Greywords arrives at Filia's door.  
Go inside?  
Or lie in wait?  
Sabotage it?  
Or let it sabotage itself?  
Xellos smiles.  
Perhaps something in between.  
With a fizzling sound and a bodily shimmer, Xellos teleports off the roof. And inside the cottage.  
"Zelgadiss?" Her voice. Her indescribable voice. Syrup. Larks. A music box. When angered, a bugle. A lioness's cry. When sad, the rustle of a field of tall grains. The voice that his most private self worshiped, like the rest of her, like an idol when it was the Beastmaster he was supposed to love most. The girl he loved so damned much.  
Oh, Filia, damn you. You don't know a thing about us, or yourself.  
And then she runs right into him—collides with him bodily, in her clumsy, adorably clomping charge down the stairs.  
Xellos is overpowered by honeysuckle, and he hopes Filia doesn't hear him moaning with suppressed longing.  
She draws back like a child burned by a stovetop. Not a bad analogy, when it comes to the two of them. "It's you," she blurts, rather stupidly, face blank.  
Damn that angel's face. He wants to kiss it and touch it and rip the flesh off it all at once. And damn that tendency to say blunt, obvious things. It's painfully cute at the same time that it's irritating.  
She's wearing a blue dress. (Oh gods. Vindicated!) A long slender blue dress, one she wore to Val's first school pageant, sexy but relatively modest, curving and swelling in all the right places. She looks like a walking, clean, loving river.  
Blue!  
"Where is Val?" Xellos is surprised at his own capacity to be calmly terse to the creature who can inspire anguish in him, now, by mere sight.  
"At a friend's," Filia replies with equal coldness.  
"Good. I don't want him hurt by this."  
She can tell his sensitivity to her son's feelings is genuine. Xellos loves Val very much, and perhaps always will. So she refrains from the retaliatory insult poised on her tongue this time. "Fine," is all she retorts. "What do you want? I'm busy. Get a meal elsewhere."  
"I haven't been hungry for some time," he hisses, casting her a haunted glare.  
Is it just her overly sympathetic imagination, or does he indeed look paler and thinner than he did a couple of months ago, less boyish, sallower? But all Filia asks out loud is, waspishly, "Oh yeah?"  
Whatever. The great self-server, Xellos, bothered by a little triste's ending? No way.  
Filia continues to delude herself in this fashion, with an internal voice that is high-pitched and a little manic, until Xellos interrupts her with his reply.  
"Yeah. I've been working overtime. Not much else to do. Gives me ample opportunities to feed on negative energies. Or to realize I have no appetite anymore in the first place."  
"The self-pity act doesn't flatter you, Xellos. You're not a victim."  
"I never was before." He smiles bitterly, the unspoken implication heavy. The words actually cause her to avert her eyes as he continues, "And the fickle tart act doesn't flatter YOU."  
Filia slaps him, so hard that the noise resounds through the cottage.  
He smiles more broadly, but it is not a kind gesture. "Do it again. I missed that. I know you did, too." His voice is snide and yet somehow colorless.  
"You're sick."  
"Yes, I am, actually, and not in the way you mean. Or maybe in addition to the way you mean. But I don't want your pity, much as you might otherwise believe. I came to watch this insane charade crash and burn. He wants Amelia, Filly. Not you. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say just he's just taking pity on you, because after all, look at you…" And then Xellos reaches out a hand and places it on Filia's hot angry cheek. Both of them falter a little bit as he adds, breathlessly, "What more could a man ask for…?"  
A throat is pointedly cleared behind them.  
Filia wriggles away from Xellos, turning her back to him. "He's leaving, Zelgadiss. So you stay put." Her voice is high and thin, now, to match that hysterical voice in her head.  
Xellos alone recognizes it as her trying-not-to-bawl voice.  
Much as the mazoku wishes he could claim to dismiss that voice, it cuts him in places he had thought were sealed off or absent. So he trains his cat-slit amethyst eyes on the bundle in Zelgadiss's hands. He sneers. "Oh, flowers. The most pointless trope of all romantic gestures."  
Filia lets out a little gasp and turns on him in disbelief. "Don't be a hypocrite."  
"I'M not," he retorts immediately.  
"Get over yourself, Xellos," Zelgadiss intercedes brusquely. "Don't be a sore loser."  
Xellos profoundly insults the honor and significance of his adversary : He doesn't even look at Zelgadiss. He doesn't even dignify his dig with a reply. He keeps his eyes glued on the flowers, and Filia's face, in intervals. "What are those? Vendor-bought? On sale for a gold coin? Heh."  
"Yes," says Zelgadiss, but Xellos does not proceed until Filia, too, says, "Yes, I assume so."  
"HA," Xellos brays, and nothing more.  
"I think they're…er, lovely," Filia growls, cheeks exploding a bright, self-condemnatory red.  
"Liar." Now Xellos turns and looks directly at Zelgadiss, a weird gaze of triumph and condescendence. "She likes wildflowers." He smiles acidly at the predictably tame pink bouquet that Zelgadiss proffers Filia.  
"THAT's a lie," she hotly intercedes, seizing the flowers—looking not at Zelgadiss, but at Xellos. "Ignore him! Pink is my favorite color!"  
He barks another laugh—it sounds forced. "It is not. Blue is." He gazes suggestively at the very dress she wears.  
"Blue is YOUR favorite color for me, not MINE."  
There is a vein gently pressing against the fair olive skin of his temple. "Oh? Well I must say it looks ravishing on you right NOW. And why is over half your wardrobe blue? Why was it, before you and I even became involved?"  
Her cheeks flame. "It's a convenient color—it goes with everything!"  
"Bullshit." He laughs again—high, cold, scornful. "You like wildflowers, you like them blue, and all kinds of other colors, you like them chaotically different. You like all kinds of textures and values and hues and scents. You pick wildflowers and you grow them in your garden. I know. I stopped to look. I PAID ATTENTION, because that MATTERS TO YOU."  
Zelgadiss steps back, looking both irritated and strangely abashed. One for the curt and cutting remark, he now appears speechless. He is watching Filia closely.  
Filia is physically shaking in rage, her eyes moist. She only hesitates a moment before flinging the cruelest blow she can think of: "HE can say he loves me. He can SAY it. He has HUMANITY in him. Normalcy. WARMTH."  
Xellos falters. His eyes narrow and he hisses in a pained breath, through bared fangs. Then he is composed, and he is smiling. "He can SAY it. I can SHOW it. It's too late, Filia. No one will ever grasp the paradox that is YOU better than ME. I see your soul and it's BLUE."  
And then he is gone.  
Silence.  
Zelgadiss advances on his date carefully. "…Filia?"  
"Let's go."  
He sighs, swaying from one foot to the other in thought. His white shaman robes billow. "We don't have to do this. I think maybe it's too soon…for me as well…"  
"No. Let's go." She grabs his hand; the bones in his wrist make a cracking noise with her fervor as she drags him out the door.  
This time, there is no one on the roof watching.


	2. Experimental Chemistry

**Blue  
A Slayers Fanficlet  
By A. Stitt**

**PART 2**

When Lina Inverse is unexpectedly alone, she thinks of strange things. Things one might attribute to a far more sentimental person.  
This is particularly likely when her solitude is the result of sudden and unintentional rejection by the hulking blond puppy that she rigorously denies she is in love with.  
DENIES!  
Damn that Gourry. Damn him for drooling and tripping on his own tongue, following the first dark haired, big-breasted, long-legged woman in this village, out the door, and away from HER. Damn him for not realizing that he belongs to her, in more ways than one, even if she would never admit lowering herself to the standard of an eye-candy mercenary idiot as her lover…a sweet, bumbling, loyal, devoted idiot…  
Lina sits outside a restaurant, after stuffing herself to the gills, as the colloquialism goes, on a bench next to a china shop. The settings remind her piercingly of a notable time she was with Gourry, and witnessed an incredible tenderness between two of her closest comrades in arms: Xellos Metallium and Filia Ul Copt. Why she wants to think on the pair of her friends who "made it work" in ways she and Gourry never have, she is not sure…perhaps Lina is a masochist…

_Lina doesn't remember the particulars of the campaign, she only remembers a campaign was formed, quite a while ago, to curb one of the Demon Lord Deep Sea Dolphin's erratic, disruptive quests to unleash Shabranigdo—at the expense of her siblings Zelas Metallium and Dynast Grausherra's lives—and Lina and company were called in to assist the defensive strike.  
Xellos, one of the most superbly competent mazoku generals in the history of the Red World, led the monster defensive.  
He hardly appeared during the campaign except at its close, when Lina, Gourry, and Filia—by then a Knight of Ceiphied and great power in her own right—had cornered Deep Sea Dolphin's general, Riksfalto.  
The battlefield was as understated as Xellos's malevolence itself could be—a plain seaside village in the Outerworld. Because Lina and Gourry were ravenous and Filia had acquired high sums of gold coins selling pottery and vases, they took two rooms at the local inn.  
Yes, only two.  
Lina didn't meet Filia's eyes when the decision was made, and Filia asked Lina if she were sure she didn't want three rooms. The diminutive sorceress murmured something about "trying not to splurge on things anymore."  
Gourry had laughed, cluelessly, tossing his thick horse-mane of golden hair. But the way he'd laced an arm around Lina's waist, one wondered how much really evaded his cerebral radar.  
Or his…pants.  
Or his more tender sentiments. Yes, even Gourry, the medieval Ken Doll, truly had those.  
For some reason, Filia hadn't chastised Lina for what the sanctimonious dragoness would ordinarily deem loose female behavior. She had just smiled gently, her aquamarine eyes soft, and let it be. "Purple hair, purple eyes…that idiot had better be alright," the dragoness had muttered cryptically, signing the roster for the innkeeper.  
The next morning a loud crash outside roused Filia alone in bed, and Lina and Gourry not so alone in bed. Variously clothed, they had all run to their adjoining windows.  
Outside was Xellos locked in a deadly dance with Riksfalto, a large-boned woman with one scarred-shut eye and short tousled green hair, and skintight porpoise-slick blue armor. His plain, wooden, red-tipped staff was somehow overpowering her three-tipped trident sword. Their movements were such beautiful, musical intervals of volcanic fury and poetic grace that Lina almost forgot to go help her comrade.  
Filia moved first—stepping out on the window—in just her nightgown, holding just her mace.  
Lina would have rather faced Shabranigdo fully reincarnated while submerged in a tank of water than Filia, right that moment, solely judging from the look the dragoness was casting Riksfalto. However…  
"STAY," Lina barked, as though to a cherished lapdog, and not a girlfriend and ally in arms. "And CALM the HELL DOWN. If Riksfalto kills you, XELLOS will kill ME." Then she whipped around, her red hair lashing in Gourry's face.  
He spat it out and blinked, confused and bewildered.  
An inexplicably protective impulse seized Lina. She snarled her preferred and oddly fond nickname for the airheaded warrior, "YOU STAY TOO, JELLYFISH-BRAINS. NO BLONDS ALLOWED ON THE BATTLEFIELD TODAY."  
"But LINA…"  
"NO. Ray wing!" And she soared out the window and right into the fray, murmuring the prologue of a Dragon Slave.  
Xellos, sleek purple wolf that he was, slunk past, shoved Lina out of his line of fire. "Don't spoil my killing spree, Lina-kins," he crowed in the middle of tackling Riksfalto, holding up a finger in a ludicrously capable display of nonchalant wittiness.  
The sorceress let out an infuriated sputter. "I'M HELPING YOU, MORON! You just interrupted my incantation!"  
"That's lovely, Lina," Xellos panted, straddling Riksfalto and aiming his staff to skewer the other mazoku directly in the heart. Obviously he wasn't listening to the sorceress, and thought her assistance pointless. Arrogant prickface. "HOLD STILL, RIKSY! AAAHAHAHA. We've been at this for an hour, I'm bored and I want my morning TEA…"  
But then Xellos's maniacal rant aborted abruptly. He grunted, like a child caught eating dessert before his green beans.  
All he had done was gaze, for a flickering instant, peripherally at a place over Lina's shoulder.  
Now, he dismounted General Riksfalto and offered her a malevolent, if shaky, smile. He held up both hands ingenuously. "Go," he said, and nothing else. His eyes blazed ruby.  
The big-boned aquatic demon tossed her algae-hued hair sulkily. Lina thought she actually saw Riksfalto's lower lip jutting out. Riksfalto straddled the place where she had fallen, proudly refusing to wipe her bleeding lip—surely Xellos's handiwork. It dripped grotesquely.  
Xellos's expression further soured. "Go. Now." He spoke as if to a mentally challenged toddler.  
"What in seven hells are you up to?" Riksfalto rumbled. She flailed her trident-sword in his face once or twice, impotently. In other circumstances, it would have been keenly amusing.  
Xellos looked, to Lina's consternation, as if he were about to bodily collapse. But it was not the kind of collapse indicative of a physical weakness, a swoon. Rather it expressed the frustrations of a junkie whose beloved hypodermic needle was just barely out of reach. "You would never comprehend just what, even if I felt like condescending to tell you." He leered. Synthetic nails on chalkboard would be more palatable than that smirk, even through his apparent agony.  
"Bastard." But something in his eyes made her comply. She vanished in a fizzling whoosh of black electricity and sea mist.  
About four seconds passed before Lina let her incredulous temper get the best of her. "Xellos, what the HELL?" she roared. "You had her! You HAD her!" She nearly tore at her hair.  
"Tasty. Very piquant." Xellos was indubitably remarking upon the subtle flavorings of Lina's confusion and rage. He sank down on a cheerfully red town bench. He covered his eyes haphazardly with a long-fingered, pale hand. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, as if, once again, he were controlling a base animal urge with some difficulty.  
"What…?" Lina repeated, more delicately. She perched on the arm of the bench.  
"Calming down," he explained, in a cordial voice, but his hand was trembling.  
"Why?" But by now Lina had already looked for the mysterious conscience-stimulus over her shoulder, and had found Filia Ul Copt watching from the doorway of the inn—watching Riksfalto's near-mutilation with mute, pale horror. The dusty rose of the dragoness's cheeks, upon Xellos's sudden dose of pacifism, was already returning. She was even, quietly, smiling.  
"My dear girl," Xellos drawled at Lina, like Errol Flynn or Lucius Malfoy, through his supporting hand.  
"Don't be a prig," Lina snarled. "I figured it out. You censor yourself for her. You hide your darker impulses for her. You genuinely consider her feelings." She thought on Gourry, and how something had compelled her to make him stay behind the battle that day, in their hotel room.  
She understood. She understood well.  
Xellos said nothing. The silence was self-condemnatory. He did have a strange breed of decency, after all. How peculiar.  
"She loves you," Lina continued. "She would do anything for you, under all that fussing. That power should appeal to you, Xellos."  
"It does…but not in the way you think."  
"What do you mean?"  
"Well, Lina-kins…"  
"Don't call me that."  
"Of course, Lina-Kins."  
She sighed.  
"Anyway," he continued smugly, slowly lowering his hand, "it's more that I like that power over Filia because it means I'm important to her. Impactful. Significant. It's not that I crave her for a sense of control or omnipotence… What power I already possess is a sufficient means to my ends, and more than satisfactory to me. No, I want Filia to protest…to have a mind of her own…If she didn't, I'd lose interest, quite frankly. As she is… I return the favor of that power to her…I give her power over me."  
"So you like a fighter."  
"I like a fighter. Correct. I like a woman who uses what she has."  
Lina chose her words carefully. She gazed at Xellos as though a connoisseur appraising an expensive antique, with vaguely stimulated interest. "It's a wonder you and I never…"  
"We might have, Lina. But then a pair of strapping, righteous blondes entered our lives. And things went as they were meant to go. I have no regrets, personally."  
"Yeah…yeah. Me neither."  
As though on cue—and Lina had the sneaking suspicion she had been eavesdropping from the start—Filia sashayed over to the pair of miscreants and parked her curvaceous posterior next to Xellos on the bench. Her cheeks were a little redder than before, confirming Lina's conjecture.  
"Honey, you look awful," the dragoness crooned. Gratitude warmed her gesture as she ran her fingers along the back of the mazoku's head, through his silky purple hair. She continued to stroke it until he spoke.  
"You should see the other guy," he chirped, with a stupid, self-satisfied grin.  
Lina rolled her eyes along with Filia.  
"Men," they chimed.  
Xellos gave an affronted scoff. "Don't gang up, fairer sex," he quipped.  
"Why not? You're practically one of us," Filia purred, and Lina cackled appreciatively.  
He scowled. "Well, now that you've given me a nice kick to the scrotum, how about some thanks?"  
"Well. I dunno. You're such an overgrown wolf cub."  
"And YOU are a lizard with boobs." He looked away, pouting. He was still quaking a bit, and the sweaty sheen had not yet left his skin.  
It happened quickly, and it made them look like matching pieces of a puzzle—Filia slid up against Xellos and tucked her head under his chin. She laced her arms around his waist and softly kissed his Adam's Apple. As he shivered a bit more violently, but not necessarily with displeasure, she countered, "I thought my gratitude for you was self-evident." And then she tucked in against him, closing her eyes, the picture of trust and security. "After all, I love you."  
Lina gave a low whistle. It was a damned good comeback. And so sweet that it could probably melt anyone shy of Hitler or Satan.  
The stupidly doting look on Xellos's face, for a fraction of a second, was almost surreal. It was one of the cutest, funniest things that Lina had ever seen, so she grinned at him, despite knowing that same person to be capable of mass murder.  
He corrected himself, reinstating the calculatedly bland smile. "Hm," was all the thousand-year-old priest could think to say. Even that much sounded hoarse with barely constrained happiness.  
"No surprises, please, love," Filia mumbled. "It's way too late to get over you."  
Xellos's gaze became wry, and distant. "Ah, Filly."  
"I mean it."  
"You really don't get it," he chuckled. It was a smoky sound, unlike the deranged chicken-clucking he often made when carried away with perverse humor. "The biggest surprise and mystery, which I was discussing with Lina here: You caught me already."  
She burrowed into his shirt with a content sigh.  
He continued, "Too late indeed. It's the long haul now."_

"Too full to move, Lina-kins?"  
For a moment Lina thinks she's having an auditory hallucination. That's not good. She's thinking entirely too much about her sociopath demon male friend.  
Wait, no. He's actually standing there in front of her—having teleported into her presence sometime during her reverie, arms folded across his black-clad chest. "Hot damn," she remarks of the coincidence, eyebrows soaring.  
"Yeah, kinda," Xellos smirks.  
Lina cocks her head, impervious to this quip. Something's wrong about Xellos's eternal grin-mask. It's tight and strained. There are no dimples. Lina is well aware of Xellos's dimples. They're criminal because they make him seem like some sort of ridiculously innocent doll. And they're not there anymore. But Lina is far too savvy to outright demand an explanation for the off-centeredness of her company. "Whatcha up to these days, Xellos?" she sighs.  
"Resignation," he croons, cupping a hand to his chin, as though a restaurant critic chewing the first morsel of the house's signature dish while the whole waiting staff crowds around the table. He renders his verdict with a little coo. "Not a typical negative sentiment I taste on you, my dear."  
"Not a 'typical negative sentiment' I can actually SEE on YOUR FACE either, Xellos," Lina shoots back, unperturbed. She turns her head towards the china shop, with an unholy surge of glee at the thought of how nice it might be to destroy its guts: vases, teacups, planters, and other fragile, perfect, dainty things…  
The monster bypasses her retort entirely, letting out a hoot. "And there's the stomping, vindictive energy I usually feel…"  
"Gourry's…not here. He…met someone."  
"So I gathered. So I understand." A darkness pitches Xellos's bubbly tenor down to a simmering, resentful baritone.  
Her garnet eyes flash to his face. "Oh, I get it. Where's 'Filly,' Xel?"  
His lip curls. "Touché." His eyes are firmly squeezed shut—closing her off.  
"So you were dumped too. Wow, so was Amelia. What a week. Venus must be in retrograde or some weird-ass thing…"  
"Actually it was sort of mutual. And I know that. Zelgadiss is actually the…other man…for Filia."  
"WHAT?" Lina hoists herself to her feet, gesticulating dramatically, and nearly taking out the eyes of several passing peasant pedestrians. Xellos smiles at them congenially and waves as they continue, bewildered. Lina keeps braying, unconcerned, "That's…not natural, somehow. Amelia actually made a charter club for rock-people rights. She actually goes around going 'golems are people too.' She's selected names for her babies with Zelgadiss. And a part of him actually LIKES all that. You can't think this will last, Xellos. Come on, chin up…I told you countless times before, getting in fights is like a bizarre ritual for you and Filia. My gods, you're so in love it almost hurts my teeth to watch you two sometimes…"  
"Believe what you want, Lina. I don't care…"  
"Sure you don't. You look thin, Xellos."  
"Why is everyone saying that?" The bridge of the mazoku's nose wrinkles. He draws his black cloak tighter over his mandarin-necked cream tunic, peevishly.  
"Because it's true."  
"Hmm." Evasive Xellos. Like wind itself. He opens his eyes, hopping up on one foot, his clothes limply swaying from side to side, adopting the appearance of a drunk flamingo, or a very happy monkey. Only Xellos is capable of looking so playfully absurd at certain times, and so fiercely menacing at others. Lina wonders if this is one thing that Filia fell in love with.  
"Do you still get to see Val?" she persists. "I know you…got really close to the kid…"  
For the third time, he completely ignores her delving questions. For the third time, there are no dimples when he smiles. "I know what you were thinking when you looked at that china shop." He giggles that giggle that Lina thinks taps directly into the Sea of Chaos itself—a high, erratic, cold series of notes. Frantic, unforgiving, and a little insane.  
She chooses to ignore the chills that it inspires in her even now, after years of knowing him. "Oh? What was I thinking, Xellos?"  
"You wanted to go in there and fuck it up. All of it. All the pretty little things…AHAHAHA…eeehehehe…"  
She blinks. "Wow. Coarse language from you."  
"I'm angry, Lina. I want to demonstrate that anger." He cracks his knuckles, removing his cloak in a single graceful flourish.  
No kidding, the sorceress muses, watching that smile grow ever tighter on Xellos's face, but no less empty. "Okay then. Let's go wreck a china shop." She is surprised to hear herself the calmer, clearer-headed, more cerebral of the pair of them. What a strange role reversal. The whole world is piercingly clear and distant as she follows him into the ceramics shop's front room. She and Xellos have been left behind by their "strapping pair of altruistic blonds"…and suddenly it becomes obvious to Lina why it is a ceramics shop, of all places, that he is so eager to destroy.  
It is ceramics that Filia is fondest of making.  
Filia.  
Xellos, the master of artifice and diplomacy, strides right past the prune-like old lady at the front desk. He lifts a finger and waves as if to a far-off band of comrades. A blinding red light pierces a whole wall of teapots, which shatter in devastated shards. Xellos giggles, shoulders shaking manically, eyes open and crimson-hued. "This is fun," he whispers in a deranged, quivering voice. Whether he is hilarious or horrifying to the observer is up for grabs—per typical, with Xellos.  
Lina senses the control seeping from his form, and, consequently, senses the safety seeping from a ten-mile vicinity. It is rare for Xellos to abandon his cerebral nature. When he does, he abandons it fully, and the results are cataclysmic on each of the handful of occasions.  
"Lady," Lina bellows at the woman at the front desk, a woman wearing a frilly pink dress and saccharine cameo brooch at her neck, whose mouth is shaped in a comical and protesting "O." "HEY! I said, LADY! Just take my word for it, and GET OUT FAST."  
She flings her entire coinpurse at the woman in compensation, silently cursing ten generations of Xellos's family—never mind that this is logistically impossible to do—for losing her a month of looting in order to have a temper tantrum at his ex girlfriend in absentia.  
"Play with me, Lina!" Xellos shrieks, doing a back-flip onto the counter. His maneuver, and the glowing redness of his eyes, cause the old shopkeeper to flee the place as swiftly as she can. He doesn't wait for her to clear the place before he casts a Blast Bomb—an immensely potent fire spell invented by Lei Magnus—at the adjacent wall of teacups. "AAAHAHAHAHAHAHA…"  
"Oh, whatever, Xel," Lina grumbles, emerging from behind the counter after the sizzling hot winds of black magic have dissolved. "Seems like my contribution is pointless if you're gonna be so…theatrical."  
He trumpets another cackle, rearing back like a man with a long invisible whip, prepared to take out the remainder of the shop wall.  
Lina rolls her eyes at the completely demolished left half of the shop. The mauled potsherds of countless wares crunch under her feet as she steps towards her friend and his perennially schizophrenic antics. She casts a half-hearted fireball right at the smallest and most delicate pink bone-china cup on the shelf.  
And Xellos wakes up. "N-NO! Not THAT ONE!"  
He teleports in front of the fireball, taking full impact, and wrapping his arms around that teacup, protecting it like a baby.  
"…Xellos?" Lina balks.  
"No, just…keep going. Just not this one, is all." He clears his throat, straightening, still holding the teacup between his palms. Calm, collected, detached again, even though his hands are shaking the slightest bit.  
Absurd. Why should he care if SHE would want it? Why should it concern him now?  
Lina and the china shop fade into the background.  
And Filia.  
Filia.  
Filia floods everything again. Like always.

_He remembers the first time he touched her skin, and realized just how soft and malleable it really was. How it thrilled him in ways that a thousand-year-old man should not have found possible. How it was like taking that little wooden rake through the Zen garden, the creamy, milky, willfully parting sands of the Zen garden, making fine imprints with his fingers along the flesh of her arms, her hips, her stomach, below her stomach, before she let out a keening, bleating sound and went stiff, and then limp—and then he apologized, he actually apologized, for making marks on her skin like that, for hurting her at all.  
A mazoku apologized for causing pain.  
That was how much he loved her.  
But then she had told him it was not pain that had caused her to cry out, and she trained his hands back on her peachy, slightly sweaty flesh, and commanded more. And then she yelped again, delighted yet embarrassed, and covered her face with her soft little hands.  
He remembers that it caused him to laugh, and to nestle reassuringly against her when her face reddened. And he remembers quite clearly that he obliged her wishes, when she was less flustered, and ready to resume their activities.  
He remembers Filia marveling at it all the next morning, cozy, secure, and satisfied, calling him the gentlest and most considerate lover a girl could hope for. Lazily wrapping her arms around his neck and demanding that he never leave her. He supposes that was the moment he first envisioned the blueness of her soul, with her sweet, healing arms like water around his neck, coiled around his feral, windy spirit, like the rain that comes with the tornado._

"Xellos. Hey, dumbass." A very different woman's voice pierces this reverie—and Xellos realizes that he has been standing dazed and gawking in the middle of the destroyed China shop, gazing at the bone China cup that he rescued from Lina's fireball, for the past ten minutes.  
The monster hadn't known himself capable of bashfulness as keen as Filia's on the night that he first made love to his dragoness. But all of a sudden, he feels a similar sort of nakedness. "I…yes, Lina-kins?" He clears his throat. Veiled by his merciful purple hair, his ears burn.  
Behind layers of consternation and annoyance, the redheaded sorceress's face conveys some measure of friendly concern. "…Are you okay? Cause I mean…wow."  
"Why?" he snaps, instantly regretting the childish tone. He cradles the teacup against his chest in one hand. With the other hand, he scratches at his eyes, which do not feel right, somehow.  
"Your eyes are…open. And…they're…" She doesn't finish the sentence.  
Xellos's eyes close like steel traps. He now has a sneaking suspicion what else Lina was going to say about them. He is grateful that humans cannot taste emotions as his race can, or Lina would be dining on his horror fit to burst. "Hm," is all he relinquishes out loud.  
"Hm indeed," Lina retorts, mirroring his facial expression of the single raised eyebrow.  
Xellos looks at his only companion with a beating heart and body in months mutely—seeing through his closed eyes, as mazoku, without a real beating heart and body, can.  
She is not nearly as beautiful as Filia. Lina is what most men would call "cute." She has a child's features—fresh, unrefined, charming, but not classically proportioned. Her lips are too thin, her eyes too large, her forehead too high. Her body is too thin, harsh almost—nothing to embrace or caress hangs on her bones. She is brassy and obnoxious, and impetuous, and rude, and greedy, and self-serving, and she has not a drop of maternal instinct or sanctimony. She is wheedling, and cajoling, and riotously fun. She is mercenary and fiercely independent, and even a little bitchy.  
One would think LINA is the one meant to be Xellos's soul mate.  
But…  
Somehow she doesn't fit. Somehow, though Xellos is intensely fond of Lina, the novelty wears out. Lina's companionship is a snack machine where Filia's is a dependable, sustaining four-course dinner.  
Perhaps it is the fact that Lina anticipates Xellos too much, and fails to react, fails to appreciate. The bemusedly arched eyebrow is all he can expect of her upon his zaniest or most malicious antics. She is too much like him—they are two people looking out at a radiant constellation in a night sky from the same perspective…and after a while, discussing, and experiencing, the same perspective becomes patently dull.  
With Filia…it is like they are standing back to back, holding hands, opposite sides of the same position, gazing up at very different constellations, or very different views of the same constellation…always with something new and exciting and even upsetting to experience together. And still, back to back, still pushing up against each other in support. And always able to turn around to say…  
Three certain words.  
Oh seven hells. Oh triple shits and double damn. And crap muffins. All there is right now is the snack machine, and not that four-course dinner.  
But…Lina has Filia's fire, and Filia's stomping domination, and Filia is not here right now. Filia is with Zelgadiss. Filia has left and gone away and made Xellos starve himself to death.  
Emptiness can be surprisingly filling. Xellos feels gorged. And for the first time in his life he acts on impulse. Desperation.  
He grabs at Lina. Lunges. With no prelude. He seizes her too-thin, childlike arms—no fleshiness at all, he muses even as he gropes—in long, serpentine, iron-firm fingers, and in one predatory, sleek maneuver, he is on top of her, straddling her like a baseball umpire.  
"Oh, screw them all, Linnikins." Why the hell is his voice shaking so much? "Let's just do it. We've been flirting with each other for years. We've felled two dark lords…well alright, I didn't have much to do with Fibrizo since he kinda was employing me, but Darkstar was bigger than Fibrizo…together, and we're such an evenly matched pair of cynical bastards with an agreement that principles and loyalty don't enter into our relationship….Why don't I make an inferno out of one of your fireballs, eh?" And where is the teacup? Did he drop it somewhere? Did he put it down safely? Oh who cares…  
Lina doesn't move. Her face is obstructed by fiery red, untidy bangs. "Xellos." Her voice, however, conveys everything that needs to be expressed. Flat, harsh, contained. "Get. Off."  
Xellos blurts it out, a tasteless retort, without characteristic forethought. "You couldn't stop me if I didn't want to stop. I'm practically omnipotent, Lina."  
"You don't rape."  
"Don't I?"  
"No. Gods, you DO smell good…but no…"  
"How do you know?" But his smile is wobbling, fading, dying. It never did show dimples, the sole visible difference between one of his "real" smiles and one of his dangerously convincing facades. His pelvis releases pressure on her hips already.  
"A conversation we had several years ago." Now Lina is a little breathless, because Xellos IS gorgeous, and Xellos IS smothering her with his incredible firm body and his scent of spices and sweets and rain…and Gourry IS with another girl right now. "When you told me that power held no significance to you for its own sake. When you said that mattering to someone as you do to Filia is what had REAL significance to you. You don't want to break a living thing just for the fun of it. You're not that evil. You don't fool me, Xellos. You don't fool me. And you sure as hell don't fool HER."  
"Don't TALK…" Xellos turns away, violet hair lashing like silk curtains… "Don't TALK ABOUT HER…" Inexplicably he giggles, flinging up his arms, already relinquishing control of Lina, if he ever had it in the first place. "Not HER."  
"WHY NOT?" Lina roars, a lioness in battle, paradoxically, a friend pointing a crucial truth out to another hurting friend. She stabs the almighty demon in the chest, causing his head to snap back in her direction. "Isn't SHE the reason why you're doing stupid pointless SHIT like blowing up ceramics shops and not eating and HITTING ON ME ON THE REBOUND? Isn't SHE the reason why you do or DON'T do ANYTHIN--"  
"And what are YOU doing if not accepting my attentions?" Xellos pounces again, leering at the young sorceress. The desolate, tight little smile without dimples looms on his face. "I mean, after all, you ARE alone, just like me. Gourry DID give up on you…for a woman with a softer voice…larger breasts…"  
And then he kisses her—forcefully, coldly, and without feeling—on the mouth. And he thinks on how thin her mouth is. How unpouting. How unlike Filia's. And it depresses him.  
"Now THAT is MEAN." Lina murmurs around his lips. She plants a snow-booted foot in Xellos's groin and shoves. Hard.  
Men of any species react similarly to this attack.  
Several excruciating, panting seconds later, flat on his back on the dusty ceramics shop floor, Xellos yelps out something that sounds like an apology, fingers spasming at sides. His face is puce colored.  
Lina is standing over him looking remarkably satisfied. "Eh, that's okay. You didn't mean any of it. I could tell."  
"But I really am sorry." Xellos pops open an eye, around a grimace. "I don't know why I did it. Any of it." His eyes grow shifty as he hoists himself up to his knees, and then his feet. "Don't tell anyone I actually apologized. I have a wicked reputation to maintain. But why I did any of this today, I don't know…"  
"I do."  
"You…do?"  
"Xellos. Buddy…"  
"Buddy?" He stops abruptly in the middle of massaging his unusually pale temples, his neat pageboy bangs all in wild, oddly sweet disarray.  
"Yes. Yes you are. I know we pretend we're not actual friends, you'd 'gladly kill me if the Beastmaster said to,' blah blah, we're just what, 'traveling allies,' or some shit like that, but really. Come on. Have a cider with me." Lina slides her arm through the mazoku's.  
Xellos blinks numbly. For once he is speechless. His amethyst cat-eyes are bewildered. "I, er…"  
"Shut up, old man. Old geezer. Aw, heh….Gourry's the one who noticed you're so OLD. Haha look at you flinch. OLD OLD OLD. One foot in front of the other. We'll get our menfolk back. Er, our manfolk and womanfolk back." And for once the human is the one who sees, and the monster the one who is blind, as she leads him out of the ravaged ceramics shop and towards the nearest warmly-lit tavern.  
"Jeez, Lina. Don't call me old…"  
"Whatever, senior citizen…C'mon, Naga's waiting for me."  
"Just a moment." Xellos Slips out of Lina's companionable grasp. "I need to…go get something that I left on the astral plane." His hand goes to his neck.  
She casts him a speculative glance.  
"No, seriously. Something…well, it's something Val made me ages ago. Oh, don't look at me like that. STOP! I said I had an evil reputation to maintain, damn it. I'll be right with you, Linnykins. Order me something." And he vanishes, ears under his hair burning again.  
Lina cackles fondly at the empty space from which Xellos has teleported. "Wow," she bellows, hands on hips. "The World Peace cause needs more Filias!"


	3. Reconciliation

**Blue  
A Slayers Fanficlet  
By A. Stitt**

**Part 3**

Speak of the angel, at the frozen lake, near her cottage dwelling…  
Filia has been prattling in a high, manic voice that could strain any crystal in a ten mile radius for the past hour: without any interruption by Zelgadiss.  
It is like an estrogen-induced filibuster.  
"I'm not really hungry anymore….who needs picnics… Are you? No, you really don't eat with that body, do you? Neither did Xellos, I mean…I mean I'm just used to men who don't eat human food is all….I think we should ice skate! Should we? I never have. Have you? Of course I may fall a lot but you can catch me and it will be lovely….yes, let's ice skate…"  
"Do you know how?"  
"No, but I can learn, you an show me, like I said you can catch me and it'll be grand somehow I just know it, I promise not to change over to true form and crack us both through the ice!"  
She turns to him and confronts a daunting dose of calculated blankness. "Zelgadiss, you don't talk very much, do you?"  
His smile is at least apologetic. "No, I really don't. Is there something you wanted me to do differently?" He bends to lace her skates for her, avoiding glancing up her skirt with a chastity that she should find admirable. But his steel-wire hair brushes her thigh, nicking her thick cotton tights. She jerks away as Zelgadiss calmly continues, "Problems of communication ought to be solved early. With Amelia, it was best that I let her talk and talk without interrupting. Perhaps you are different?"  
The very question strikes a chord of profound guilt in her gut. It is considerate and blunt all in one stroke, and it cuts her strangely to the quick—far more effectively than his hair runs her pantyhose. Filia was never quite so aware of her own self-absorption before, with Xellos—Xellos who argued back, who snapped or cackled, or even chastised, when he felt her rigid disapproval.  
Xellos's taunts had been a weird comfort to Filia—acknowledgment of her strength and sufficiency facing an adversary, her endurance and her zeal…and disavowal of her pettiness.  
With Zelgadiss, a man of neither theatrics nor silver tongue, a man of pragmatism rather than artifice, there is no indulgent bickering.  
His arid wit stings Filia's bulldozing, paradoxically naked soul.  
Sandpaper and baby skin.  
Neither gracious evasion, nor tolerant teasing, of her less flattering features: no Xellos. Only the rehearsal of brutal honesty: only Zelgadiss.  
Wait: only? ONLY? No!  
The dragoness's stomach curdles. This was not meant to be a comparison of former and present lovers: particularly not one that cast former lovers in favorable light. "No, y…you're fine! I just…enough about me! What are you up to these days, Zel…gadiss?" She gulps audibly.  
The nickname has died upon birth.  
Because phonetically, it is identical to that of that infuriating former lover whose memory hangs thick and alienating above them both even now.  
It's not lost on Zelgadiss, every bit a brilliant mind. But again that chafing aloofness dictates his actions, and he merely nods at her blunder, and proceeds. "If we dwell on that topic of discussion we may return to the person who is clearly heavily on your mind, Filia." He straightens in one rigid motion, like a tin soldier just before it is fully unwound and freezes in place. Another serene, beautiful, and oddly cold mannerism.  
"You mean…oh yes…he was the one who destroyed all those Claire Bibles, wasn't he?"  
"Yes." Unnervingly, Zelgadiss doesn't elaborate. His granite jaw grinds, and his pewter eyes glisten with a carefully adjusted glaze of nonchalance. "So you WERE thinking about Xellos just now." Again the apologetic smile, though this time Filia can't imagine why Zelgadiss is sorry.  
She feels herself sweating under her armpits and between her thighs, and in other unsightly and uncomfortable locations. "Let's skate," she mumbles, grateful for the canary-hued curtain of bangs in her face. She is not sure whether her eyes are moist, but the blurring of the snowy landscape is fairly incriminating.  
The chimera catches her arm as she falls, extravagantly, on her hindquarters. Her tail shoots out from her dress, buffering the fall, but Filia still bursts into tears that are now unmistakable.  
"Look," and the wintry world reels as her chivalrous suitor hoists her upright, "you don't have to pretend that this is working, Filia. I'm thinking about somebody else, too."  
"N-no! Don't let's give up just yet! Please!" She turns and flings her arms around his cold, hard waist.  
And then she kisses him. Forcefully, coldly, and without feeling—on the mouth. And she thinks on how hard his mouth is. How unyielding, and unplayful. How unlike Xellos's. And it depresses her.  
Zelgadiss stiffens still more, pulling his lips off hers with the smacking sound of a wet suction cup. "I'm sorry, but what are you doing?" He is genuinely perplexed. "Oh of course. No…listen, it's okay…please, Filia, relax. It's okay…I swear it is…" He fishes in his pocket and proffers a handkerchief.  
Filia takes it and sobs more because he is being so proper, instead of making some teasing yet adoring remark about how beautiful she is with raccoon-like streaks of mascara under her eyes.  
Like HE would.  
Damn HIM.  
"Filia…" Zelgadiss sighs, jaw audibly grinding again. "You've got to stop crying."  
"I'm ludicrous! It's me—it's who I am!" She squeezes out these words between her fangs, hitting his chest, both pectorals, fiercely, twice, as the hot tears rain in angry, grieving torrents. "You're supposed to find it endearing! Not just blandly observe it! You're supposed to make some snotty remark about how ludicrous I am, then say you LOVE ME ANYWAY! No matter WHAT! MAKE ME FEEL LIKE YOU'RE NOT DOING ME ANY FAVORS, ZELGADISS! MAKE ME FEEL LIKE THE FIRST MOMENT YOU SAW ME YOU'D HAVE TAKEN ME, AS I AM!"  
He watches her for a long moment. Then he whets his lips, and they shine like hematite. "I thought you accused him of being unable to say that word."  
Filia is horrified, rendered still and silent in the middle of her tantrum. "…who? I mean…what word?"  
"Love." Zelgadiss cocks his head, and his expression finally softens, and carries a kindness that makes Filia breathless, and reminds her of why Amelia was so lucky.  
Amelia.  
Left behind. Former. Like HIM. Like Xellos.  
"You're NOT thinking of me right now, are you?" she hiccups.  
"No." He is so very fair, and honest, to admit this now, at the beginning, before rebound becomes a far more profound error. And Filia is beginning to find it desirable about him. But the fact remains: He said no.  
"I need to be shorter."  
"Yes."  
"…Softer. With black hair. And enormous eyes."  
"Like a child's. Trusting, waiting. Do you know why I love her?"  
"Why?"  
"She laughs for me. I don't laugh. I can't. I find it nearly impossible. Amelia laughs for me. I dream about Amelia's laugh, and I tell her to store up laughter for me in a gold box in her spirit while I'm journeying for a cure for my body. It's a silly noise, like the bubbles in a hot spring. A stupid noise, even. But gods, Filia. It saves my soul. And I've cut it off unforgivably. I broke the lock on that box and robbed her of all her laughter when I left her. So I need to stop. There. I guess I can talk a lot if I try, huh?"  
Filia covers her mouth and looks away, still in the chimera's embrace. The moonlight casts eerie, forlorn shadows of their forms. Lonely even when entwined.  
"Now do you see why I said it was okay to talk about him?" Zelgadiss breathes. "Just do it, Filia. Perhaps this is what our date was meant to achieve all along."  
Something inside her caves like a landslide down a very slippery ravine. She succumbs. "…I don't like the flowers you gave me tonight."  
"I know."  
"I'm sorry."  
"Don't be. I'm glad you hate them. More glad than you can possibly know."  
"He can't say 'love,' you're right. But…"  
"But he can show it." And Zelgadiss parrots the very words Xellos spoke, in the throes of profound emotional pain, earlier that evening. He reaches up and makes two precise swipes at Filia's eyes, ridding her of the mascara and tears staining them. He smiles, quietly and encouragingly.  
"…Yes. I've been careless. I didn't know he had a heart to break. No…I did…I did…I won't let myself off the hook…he made Val a night light when Val had a nightmare and was sobbing…he held my hair back when I threw up one of the first times we dated…and then he rocked me all night and gave me chamomile tea for my stomach…I knew he had a heart to break…and I did, I broke it, I had a childish fit and I broke it….he looked awful tonight. Awful. I've hurt him. I accused him in an unforgivable way…"  
"Of what?"  
"I admitted to him that the Supreme Elder during the Darkstar Campaign was my father…"  
Zelgadiss makes an incredulous noise in his throat.  
Filia bows her head. "…and then I accused him of being so self-centered that he wouldn't have spared my father even now, knowing he was my father, for my feelings, if it were against his own needs…I said that he wouldn't even cut his hair to save me…"  
Zelgadiss chortles. "Sorry," he adds, on the receiving end of a chiding glare. "But that was a good one. He's so dandy-vain about that damned purple hair, hah!"  
"No…it was awful…so awful of me…"  
"Filia, look…hah!... sorry…look, I suspect it was more of a mutual wounding than that. I can't imagine Xellos didn't throw some zingers of his own. He can be the cruelest sort conceivable."  
"But it needs to be healed mutually, on the same token. And…no. He isn't cruel to me…he abstains from that…he's a…Val and I call him a vegetarian mazoku….because he won't feed on our sorrows, or our miseries, or even our anger. Nor will he willingly produce those energies by his own actions. I've underestimated him. And if Amelia's laugh alone 'saves your soul'…well, then…"  
"That is true. Though we have our work cut out for us. Perhaps we should become charter members of the Take Back Your Old Lovers Support Group."  
Filia laughs wetly. "Amelia will take you back. Amelia is forgiving. Endlessly so."  
"And isn't Xellos?"  
"I thought you hated Xellos. I thought you always expected the worst kind of behavior from him."  
"Pretty much. But Filia…you said yourself that you are different in his eyes."  
The dragoness finds herself giggling softly, carried away on a ridiculous and sweet memory. "Do you know," she begins, suddenly feeling light, and warm, and boisterous, "that when Val turned four, I was totally broke because the sales on my Greek line of teacups were super low, so the day before his birthday, Xellos and I went to buy him a cake at the only pastry shop in town…and," she giggles loudly now, flinging her arms wide while Zelgadiss holds her by the waist and softly smiles, "and the priggish old baker wouldn't let us have a cake with Val's favorite color …there were twenty pink cakes and Val wanted a green one, and the baker wouldn't make any new ones till the twenty pink ones were sold, and I couldn't AFFORD to buy all of them to get her to make a new green one…so Xellos…HEHE…Xellos antagonized the baker, and then he ATE ALL OF THE PINK CAKES on the SPOT…and the baker was so taken aback and shaken that she made us that green cake…HEHE and Val was so happy that year with his grotesque green cake…Poor Xel, his tummy was so fat and full and sore all through Val's birthday…but Val was SO happy with his cake, and I think it was his best birthday ever, and that was all that mattered to me, and so it mattered to Xel too….!" At last Filia dissolves into laughter that feels quaking and strange, too intense, on the border, too of tears. But after she has cried a little longer, while Zelgadiss holds and pats her, she feels that buoyancy, that hope, return. "I love him so much."  
"I can tell," says Zelgadiss, who has an appreciative look on his face, as well. "I'm…actually…more impressed by Xellos than I have ever been. Thank you for that…EXTREMELY odd…but touching…anecdote."  
Filia's hand, still covering her mouth, traces her own lips pensively. She nibbles on a nail. "He says my soul is blue. I guess only a soul mate can discern another soul mate's color…"  
"I guess so. In fact, I'd stake a sure claim on it."  
Filia's scaly golden tail curls around Zelgadiss's arm and squeezes it affectionately. "Thank you," she murmurs, leaning against him.  
"MOMMY." A young, thin, high voice pierces the night air. Both adults turn their heads in time to see a flourish of black feathers and a small, aqua-haired, topaz-eyed child landing in front of them. His little face has the keenness of a fox's and the sweetness of a puppy's: Val. "What are you DOING? Where's Xel? I came home early coz I had a bad dream and…and I need your goodnight kiss…and Xel oughtta read me a story…." The child casts a mutinous, territorial look up at Zelgadiss, who promptly disentangles himself from Filia. "I don't want HIM to read me a story," he adds darkly. "He might poke out my eyeballs with his hair."  
"Valteira," Filia hisses quietly, bending to embrace her adoptive son. "Honey, that's rude!"  
"No, it's not." Zelgadiss is broadly grinning, for the first time all evening. He even chuckles, a quiet, rustling baritone sound. "I didn't eat twenty cakes on Val's behalf. It makes perfect sense, Filia. It's all going to be okay. Everything is making sense again. I'm heading out, Val. You and your mom have some story-time, alright?"  
The child only glares back through cascades of his mother's dandelion hued hair, squeezing her tightly, squeezing the smell of this interloper out of her pores.  
Filia turns sheepishly to face her magnificently crashed date, and it is her turn to smile apologetically. "Er, I'm sorry, he's terribly protective of me…"  
"I'd not have it any other way," Zelgadiss grins. "Are you alright getting back inside by yourselves?"  
"Completely," Filia replies, shining.  
"Kay. Then BYE," Val spits pointedly.  
"Of course—I have someplace to be myself," Zelgadiss concedes, waving at the cuddling pair of dragons. He does not even pause to remove his ice skates: He glides down the frozen lake, around a bend, and out of sight.  
Gently smiling, and lifting her child into her arms as she sits to remove her own skates, Filia is fairly certain the city of Saillune is the skating chimera's destination point.

An extraordinarily tall woman stands up at the front of the warm, dark-lit tavern. She shakes out her blue-black waterfall of hair, her long-lashed lapis lazuli eyes narrowed in a slightly drunken attempt at shrewdness—which comes across as near-sighted squinting. She bridles her chest, baring a scantily-clad body that ought to exist only by the hand of an excessively hormonal male sculptor. A black-gloved hand flies coquettishly to her kittenish lips in a fit of humor at the entering Lina's expense: "WHY LINA, alone AGAIN, are we? This is why you shouldn't have ditched me in Zephilia with your sister when you were barely sixteen and gone trekking around the Red World with that baboon, Rowdy Gabriev's grandson! WUHHHhoohoohooho, WUHHHhoohoohoo…"  
"Naga, that laugh is beginning to border on obscenity." The petite sorceress with flame-tongue hair collapses into a chair near Naga's table.  
"Good! Splendid!" Naga clasps her hands, enrapt, evidently, at her own obscene nature. A delicate pink blush appears on her ivory cheeks.  
Lina sighs. Sometimes she hates how gorgeous all her female friends are. "I'm not alone, by the way. I brought a friend who needs cheering-up as much as I do."  
"A MALE friend…?" Naga lurches towards Lina, and one of her few endearing traits—her genuine pleasure at another person's good fortune—shows through in her shining expression. She stumbles over a bar stool. "Oops…"  
"Watch it…no…"Lina's eyes narrow. "Not THAT type of male friend. A man, though, yes. You met him briefly before. My mazoku friend."  
"Oh that, Xanalliptus…Xucchini….Xe…X-something Metal-Aluminum…"  
"Xellos Metallium, Naga."  
"YEAH, him. Didn't he try to kill you once?" Naga hiccups. "Isn't he some manner of sociopath all powerful demon thingie?"  
Lina summons patience, and feels a pang of nostalgia at the fact that she had to muster just such a virtue frequently on Gourry's behalf. "It was just business. Orders. We have an understanding. He just broke up with his girlfriend. He's pretending to be the heartless bastard type, since that's the typical response from a mazoku, but he's languishing like hell. So I brought him here with me. He's just getting something his ex's son made him."  
"Gotten soft on your friends, have you?"  
"Can you imagine losing the people you love most?"  
"Amelia just did." Naga arches an eyebrow. "Don't lecture me on the issue. That pile of steaming rock-feces, how dare he walk out on my painfully naïve kid sister…."  
"Alright, I won't lecture ya…since I'm such a 'softie.' And ew, by the way."  
"WUHHHH-hoohoohoo. You're so weird, Lina-poo."  
"Why does everyone add some stupid suffix to the end of my name?"  
Before Naga can counter, Xellos's smokiest voice interjects behind them, "Because you're so easy to goad, Lina-kins. Ahhh. Yes. I really WAS rather hungry. Thanks for that appetizer of annoyance."  
"Whatever." Lina rounds on Xellos's form, inspecting him. Nothing's different, except for the fact that his black, Greek-meander trimmed cloak is reinstated, if off one shoulder. His hair, too, remains messier than usual. "….Hey…I thought you were pickin' something up…?"  
"I have it." And he closes the topic, with a tight little smile. He brushes his bangs out of his eyes, which, as testimony to his hazy-mindedness, he leaves unguardedly open again. "Ah. And you'll be the charming Naga. Enchante, I assure you." Blandly, distractedly, Xellos takes Naga's regally thrust-out hand and kisses the top of it.  
Naga's expression has changed. It's as sharp as Xellos's is vague.  
For the second time that evening, Lina marvels at a blatant role reversal.  
"I really remember you now," Saillune's unknown ex-crown-princess remarks.  
"People don't easily forget me. I either leave a distinct impression, or I kill them." Xellos is glancing around for the bartender. He sits. He curls his legs up under him, then draws his knees to his chest. He folds his arms on his knees, steepling his fingers, like a praying mantis.  
"You're the dragoness's boyfriend," Naga pushes onward, mercilessly. "That's the woman that assface Zelgadiss was going to see tonight."  
Lina gasps out loud. For Naga's own safety, she gestures at her, wildly, but covertly as possible.  
A single line, deeply cut, forms between Xellos's perfect black eyebrows. A frown, and a composed, refined frown at that.  
Naga gets the feeling there's quite a bit of cerebral activity teeming behind that carefully calculated blankness. Quite a bit, which he is expert at hiding.  
She can fix that. She smirks and slides into Xellos's lap. She presses her most outstanding physical features against his chest.  
Lina gags. The rest of the tavern howls and catcalls as the extremely attractive pair of dark-haired creatures become entangled.  
Xellos has a little more color in his impassive cheeks, but otherwise his face is still superhumanly bland. "Yes?"  
"So…my sister's fiancé and your ex…" she purrs. "What a shame. They mean well but they just don't fit, do they? I think I shall probably castrate him sometime this week for breaking my sister's heart." She reels back her head and lets loose a high, haughty giggle that mimicks the cry of an exotic and colorful bird.  
Xellos's face becomes, if possible, blanker. "Ah." He shifts weight under Naga, expertly wiggling out of her grasp, like some eel. "Jolly good for you. If you'll excuse me…"  
"That's funny," Naga persists, fixing glistening azure eyes on his profile. She traces it, softly, with one black-gloved finger. "Not that we've had much of an acquaintance, but I always thought you were a wild one under that…absurd politeness. I never thought of demons as …blasé in bed."  
"Sorry to disappoint." The acid in Xellos's voice could melt skin. He smiles point-blank into her face. It's not a friendly gesture. _Still no dimples,_ muses Lina.  
"See here, Mr. Metallium. I'm picky with my lovers…"  
"Oh, gods…" Lina mumbles, head clutched in hands. She foresees prompt world destruction upon the sexual union of the pair before her.  
"And," Naga proceeds as if not hearing, "I have singled you out. You're a lonely gorgeous man. I'm a bored gorgeous woman. We're both perfectly single. Let's have at it." And then she wraps her long and ludicrously perfect marble thighs around his waist. "Not in public, of course. I'm not tasteless. Take me to my room at this inn. Lina will…go find Gourry and frolic about in his chambers." She makes a dismissive gesture, apparently oblivious to the homicidal and animal grunts emanating from Lina's table.  
Xellos casts Naga's thighs the gaze of an art dealer who has just stumbled upon a yet-undiscovered ten-foot oil painting by an Old Master.  
He shifts weight again, once, twice. The movement is not fidgety, but rather sleek and smug. A hungry leer builds on his face as Naga calmly, seductively strokes his hair.  
Then her lips part and move toward his. She rears up onto his chest.  
A look of discomfort crosses Xellos's face, as if something sharp is sticking him.  
And he teleports to the opposite side of the tavern—by himself.  
"Sorry." He sounds slightly husky, and very breathless, but other than that not a hair on his head is disheveled.  
"Sorry?" She casts him an arch glare. Her indignation is regal.  
"The problem with your otherwise brilliant plan, Miss Naga, is that I am not single. I'm taken. I'm not a human, I'm a demon. It's already extraordinary that I care for even one person aside myself. I've cultivated that caring for a certain woman and her son for a long while. It would be foolhardy to blow it all now." Xellos's lip quirks. "And anyway, you'd not be happy if I admitted I was picturing you just now as blond, with pointy ears, and smaller..ah well…" He whets his lips, his eyes conspicuously avoiding her chest.  
Naga's smile in return is surprisingly serene. "I understand," she says. "Nothing would make me happier than if you won Filia back. Amelia is suffering right now, and that idiot chimera needs to remember where his loyalties lie."  
Xellos nods; it's like a period at the end of a clincher sentence—it needs no elaboration. So he vanishes, with a whisk of wind and a physical shimmering-out.  
"Now THAT is self-control," Naga comments at the place from which he has teleported, seizing her brandy bottle.  
Lina stares accusatorily, and amusedly, at her female companion across their two tables. "You did that on purpose. You knew he'd say no." She flings it out before Naga can compose a clever cover-up.  
The self-christened White Serpent's eyes narrow. "I don't know what you're talking about. He's a very attractive man…demon…thingie…"  
"Something I'm not denying. But Naga the Serpent has ten attractive men waiting in the wing. For what it's worth, it worked. I bet my life savings in gold coins that he's going to Filia's. You're a good big sister. Looks like everything's going back to how it should be, and soon."  
"…Whatever you say, Lina." Naga sips daintily on her brandy. But under the hand that cups the glass and hides her mouth, she's grinning very impishly indeed.  
The grin fades, and Naga's eyes take on a considerable keenness, when a certain chimera, clad in ice skates, enters the bar, approaches her table, and breathlessly demands, "Where's Amelia?"  
"Fast work," Lina snorts from her table. "Oh, and hey, Zelgadiss."  
The chimera narrows his eyes first at the entire tavern gawking at his outlandish appearance and dramatic entry, and then at the tiny sorceress in particular. A decided smugness descends upon his features. "It may interest YOU to know that a certain hulking blond, and I do NOT mean my date this evening, thanks, is wandering around with a rather conspicuous red handprint on his face just outside the tavern the next village over. Alone. As in, by himself. I ice-skated right past him."  
Lina purses her lips. Her burgundy eyes glisten puckishly. "Tellim where your sister is, Naga. He's a good man. Always did make a great sidekick."  
"Ha ha, Lina," Zelgadiss grunts mirthlessly at her back, as she flies from her chair and out the tavern door, leaving elder sister and prodigal lover to spar, and work out a fond reunion. The sound of Zelgadiss's grumbled apologies and Naga's reedy cackles follow her outside. She has a feeling Zelgadiss and Amelia will be re-negotiating the names of their first and second-born children before the night is over.  
"Hope you're winning back your other piece, too, Xellos," Lina murmurs as she runs.

Val awakens to the smell of citrus, spice, and rain: the smell of dad, dad with the playful ways and the hidden eyes and the forever smile, who has been gone for painful months. Dad who taught him to tie shoes, who helped him learn how to fly, who did everything from clean up his puke to eat twenty cakes on his fourth birthday. He gasps softly and reaches out in the dark for mom's best boyfriend ever, who became dad, whom he misses. "Xel?"  
"Correct!" A lean, solid form hovers over him. Arms lace loosely around his body and squeeze. "Morning, sleepyhead." Dad smells like earth and sweat today too. It's unusual. And dad's hair…why isn't dad's hair swishing in Val's face, and tickling his nose, like usual, when he hugs him.  
Val opens up bleary honey-colored eyes and looks up into dad's face. Those eyes widen.  
"Xel…you look different…"  
Dad chuckles. Soft, melodic, high. Val is so used to it that it's like a lullaby soothing him back to unconsciousness. He smiles and nestles his head against dad's chest, where a necklace that he made dad last Father's Day safely hangs.  
"Yyyeah ahaha…I know I do. Go back to sleep, buddy," Xellos's voice comes from somewhere over him. "I'll be here when you wake up."

Filia wakes up and has a very odd thought:  
_What is that smell?_  
It's like sweat and dirt, only muted by more pleasant things like flowers and spices. It wafts in her window. She rises, scowling, wondering if Jillas or Gravos has too long neglected a bath.  
She rises from bed, in just a pale blue nightgown and pink satin robe. Her bare feet land on many small, crunchy things. She resists the urge to envision something disgusting, like a colony of dead ants, and shriek. She looks down slowly through her disheveled frosty lemon bangs.  
Seeds. All kinds of seeds. Various sizes and shapes. And with them, bulbs. Hundreds of thousands of them—all leading down the stairs.  
Filia recognizes the impish, paradoxically sweet and yet seductive work of one former lover when she sees it. She swallows audibly. "Xellos?" She calls the name timidly. She had intended to go looking for him that week…damn him for always making the first move…always knowing her so well…always anticipating her so keenly…  
She bites her lip until her fang pierces the flesh, and then she swallows back the little rivulet of blood, chastising herself for her nerves. He will not get the better of her!  
The bulb and seed trail leads into that selfsame patch in the back of Filia's garden where mums had been fruitlessly planted—and all died—that past autumn day, when they had broken up.  
Filia now comes upon an entirely transformed ten-by-ten foot space of earth. Tenderly prepared by a creature of destruction, a garden, a thing of growth and newness, has been sewn. Rows of bulging mounds are ploughed. Nothing but soil yet. But soon, the possibilities!  
Filia drops down on her knees and covers her mouth, and stares at this incredible peace-gift for a long time. Never would she have expected Xellos to apologize first. And yet…  
Xellos appears inches from the knelt-over Filia's face. She is bombarded first by a close-up of his chest. His cloak is tied lopsidedly like a barber's bib, the red brooch missing. There are odd slivers of purple all over his clothes. She looks up, and soon discovers why.  
His hair is short. Clumsily chopped off, above his perfect jawline and his ears, which are surprisingly cute and small. He looks so much more ordinary that way, like any other careless early-twenties guy. Not like the fourth most powerful mazoku in the known world. Not like someone who could easily, heartlessly buck a romantic fling and move on. Not like a thousand year old man. More like a boy hopelessly smitten by a girl.  
Filia is unable to hide an absurd mixture of amusement and horror at the sight of her lover with one of his grandest and most appealing features severely compromised—for HER.  
Clearly Xellos reads this on her face. His ears, now exposed, and the one feature on his face that he could never quite control, are a telltale blood red. He has to know the dead giveaway of those ears. The fact that he allows them to be openly visible to her makes his silly gesture all the more endearing.  
"So what do you think?" he asks, followed by a singularly dopey chuckle.  
She falls in love with him.  
Again.  
Of course she already IS in love with him, and always will be…  
Details, details…  
Filia attempts to give Xellos an objective appraisal, but she can feel her mouth twisting up into some sort of huge, grotesque, lopsided grin. "It flatters you," she says. Her voice is shaky with laughter, and something else.  
"Oh shut up. I know it looks hideous."  
"I think you look wonderful."  
"I can make it grow back pretty fast."  
"That might be a good idea…but I still think you look wonderful."  
They stand there staring at each other. There is something desperate about the silence between them.  
The color of his ears cool but his eyes, opening, sadden. "Ah, Filia. I wouldn't have done this for anyone else. This, or a lot of other things…"  
"You're the one who stormed out, not me," she whispers. "How can you doubt my devotion to you?"  
"You're the one who leapt into someone else's arms."  
"I had to…I was going mad. All I could think about was you. Just ask Zelgadiss. It was just a distraction from feeling like I'd lost myself when you…"  
"I don't make the same mistake twice, Filly. And I don't surrender something that I want…need…" His eyes flutter closed with that admission. "…without becoming singularly nasty and stubborn about clinging to it. You have no idea how amazing you are to me. How amazing WE are to me. Unnatural, and yet essential, against the grain, and yet perfectly fit. I had not realized how much I had incorporated you into the equation of my existence until these past several weeks, when you were missing. It is the first time, I think, that a mazoku found hell on earth to be undesirable. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to admit this? I should not need you—I, free, evanescent, restless, self-sufficient—but I do. I need you very much. Why in hells should I fight a fact ever again? It would be…"  
"Illogical." She smiles so very tenderly at him. So very fondly. "You always talk too much."  
He gnaws on the side of his lip. "…Yeah."  
"…When did you decide to come back?"  
"Amelia's big sister made a pass at me, but as she was, er, trying to climb into my lap, she pushed up against this and I felt it." Xellos pulls out a grotesque little charm, hanging around his neck by an unmemorable metal chain, fashioned of half a pinecone, water fowl feathers, seeds, and other natural objects.  
It's a necklace that Val had made him for the previous Father's Day.  
So it's precious.  
"I don't ordinarily wear it to work, but I…felt a need to, yesterday. And it reminded me of what I want most."  
One of the things that Filia hates (and loves) most about Xellos is how he can erase all his transgressions over a given period of time by simply looking at her a certain way.  
Even more infuriating is the fact that this is the only way that he persuades her, cajoles her, both innocently and unintentionally.  
He really has no idea when he's doing it.  
It is perhaps indicative of the one genuine bone in his proverbial body. Over their years together, he has started to do it more and more often. It has to mean something.  
That expression, that unintentionally heart-melting expression, is indescribable. And he is giving it to her now.  
"Open" is the best word for it, but that doesn't quite do it justice. Maybe "naked" is a better word. It's a certain look that starts with his exquisite amethyst eyes. He opens them. In these moments, they remind her, bizarrely, of a virgin shyly undressing in front of a judgmental new lover: willfully vulnerable, willfully at the mercy of that judge. His face slackens into a strange, sweet calm—a resignation, an allowance of his feral and free self to be wholly captured and, in more ways than one, dismembered.  
It's naked surrender. That's how to describe it.  
His ears are red again, too.  
"Oh, Xellos, stop looking at me like that," Filia chokes.  
"Like what?" Just as she suspected, he is genuinely taken aback by an accusation of any particular facial expression. He looks ruffled, even annoyed. "I was just…"  
"I love you."  
"Oh YEAH? WELL I…what?"  
And she launches herself into his arms, knocking him over in her exuberance. They fall with an undignified squish into the mud.  
Xellos laughs—his high, reedy cackle. "Ahaha! Filly—"  
But he is unable to elaborate, because she is kissing him—hard, pressing, hot kisses. She is thinking on the yielding and playful nature of his lips, and he is thinking on the warm, cushioned feel of her lips. A perfect fit.  
Her hands comb through his now short purple hair.  
She pulls back from him after a moment, both of them heaving for breath, her hair swishing in his face and tickling his nose. He sneezes as she asked, "Tell me about this patch….darling, you made it for me all by yourself, didn't you? A mazoku cultivating a green thumb!…God bless you."  
"Haha, I hope not….OW….don't swat me, I meant to the blessing, not the green thumb…OKAY yay for blessings too!" He wriggles around ferretishly under her, getting comfortable there in the mud with his beloved blue soul lying on top of him. "This garden is most strategically constructed, actually, Filly."  
"Oh? Do tell." She settles down against him, cheek against his. She marvels at how long his black eyelashes are, how they tickle her skin.  
He marvels at how soft her cheek is, like a fresh Chile peach. And how much hair she has, and how it's all around him, flaxen, like iced lemonade, like fireflies and dandelions. "Well….everything you see here has something to do with what I associate with you. Places I've been carry these herbs and blossoms…so I went around all night fetching them, brought them back with me…made what you see here…"  
"Oh, Xellos…" Her voice is already trembling.  
"Wait, wait! No tears just yet. Keep those." His lips brush hers as he continues to explain, tracing an invisible ribbon from mound to dug-up mound. "Dogwood and gorse, for durability, because my dragoness, you are a survivor…elder, for…hehe…zealousness…aahahaa I planted a LOT of those…ow…haha don't hit me…OWHOW, don't PINCH me EITHER…Alder…for the healer in you…it's known to cure fever…hawthorn for hope…nightshade for truth…poplar for courage…snapdragon for..hehehe presumption…no, darling, I just thought it would be cute to have snapdragons in a dragon's garden….hehehe…agrimony, a sign of generosity and gratitude, and good at detecting witches, the next time Lina and her friends drop in for a surprise dinner, heh…buttercups…for cheerfulness and childhood, because you are my sweet and naïve one…cornflowers because how can I not think of your eyes when I see them?" He pauses to whisper this in one of her pink, pointed ears, to chuckle as she shivers, and nibble on it, before continuing. "Daisies…because put them under your pillow, and they will cause you to dream of your lover." Another ear-nibble. "Hmhmhm. I liked that one too…dandelions, yes, the weed, that weed you say reminds you of me, because they are 'love's oracle,' and no matter how many times you pick them, Filly, or how many of them there are to pick, 'he l-l-loves me'..ahh..will be your final answer, if you are thinking on me."  
"Don't say 'love,' it hurts you," Filia hiccups, around long-since-flowing sobs. She seizes Xellos's shirt front and inhales him so deeply that she hopes a part of him will stick forever. Oh, this man! She grabs his face in her hands now, all but smooshing it, in a fashion comical under any other circumstances. "I KNOW you love me. Oh Xellos! You idiot! Don't hurt yourself! Oh, damn you, this was the most wonderful gift I've ever received, and it made me cry!"  
"Ahaha, well, Filly, you know, you made me cry too."  
Filia pulls back, pale, shocked, her hands releasing Xellos's face. "What?"  
"Oh, c'mere. C'meeere. Hehe. Silly shy thing. Stop angsting…ahaha. That's the dragon I lov…alright! I won't say it! But it's getting easier and easier to say That Word, you know. Anyway. Ask Lina. She saw it."  
"Never again. I won't make you cry ever again."  
"Well…honey, my slate's not exactly clean. I mean…"  
"What do you…Xellos." Her tone changes, shifting not so subtly from nurturing to chastising. "Xellos, tell me what you're hiding."

"What? Oh gods."  
"No, I just….Filly. Blast. Watch this get me exiled again. Heh. Oh well. You have this perverse capacity to make me tell the whole damned truth about every stupid thing…. Look. I kissed Lina. Once."  
"…I kissed Zelgadiss. Once."  
"…I'm sorry."  
"Me too."  
"I didn't enjoy it at all." He traces world maps along her back with his finger. Because she is his world anyway.  
"Me neither…! Because…his lips weren't like…" She mumbles something and lowers her cornflower eyes, cheeks ruddy.  
"Awww-haw…like _mine_…?" He cups her chin, grinning most fiendishly.  
"Shut up." She hides her face in his neck.  
"Ahhahahah. But that's the best part! Because I didn't enjoy kissing Lina because her lips weren't _yours,_ Filly. Nobody's lips are yours, so why bother doing myself a disservice committing to anybody else? It wouldn't make sense. You know how I am about that kind of thing." His vulnerability retreats behind a cutely pompous air of nonchalance.  
Filia sees through it like a laser.  
There is a pregnant pause.  
And then Xellos goes still and limp, and moans, and lulls to the side, and arches his back, because Filia has decided to be the impish one: Filia is seeing if that claim is true, and is slowly, wetly, hotly kissing every inch of flesh from her lover's ear to his collarbone.  
Die, nonchalance! DIE! And efficiently by female lips, at that!  
"Just doing a little test…" she breathes.  
"If you don't stop that, Val will see us doing something naughty," he croaks, fairly writhing in ecstasy there in the mud. "Soon even. _Oho!_ Stoooop…" His eyes roll up in his head.  
Yes, the nonchalance has kicked the bucket.  
Filia's muffled giggling is singularly wicked. "I love this haircut. It allows me easier access to your _weak_ spots…"  
"I don't have any…nnn…weak spots…"  
"Bullshit…"  
"Ahaha! Oh my…you swore, you swo…rrrrrmmm…"  
"Mmm. Do I have you at my mercy, Priest-General Metallium?"  
"Oh hells…nnn…how does the song go… 'you remain my power, my pleasure, my pain'…not that you really cause me pain on a regular basis…well I mean it's all relative…nnnn…I mean mazoku like pain so…I mean wait that sounded smarmy and masochistic, scratch that…"  
"Hehe, shhhh. It would seem your soul-mate has you pinioned in the mud, good sir."  
"Heh. It would seem so."  
At last Filia draws back, ceasing her amorous assault on he who has confirmed, in his riddling, playful way, that they are in fact soul-mates. "I feel it bears reiteration, Xellos: I love you."  
Smokily he gazes back at her, rearing up a bit. Their noses touch in a poignantly innocent interlude, an Eskimo kiss, another of his maddening and wonderful self-contradictions, even as his eyes seduce. Filia feels her eyes brimming at the almost painful way that she adores him, and at the beauty of having the longing for their reunion so wholly fulfilled. The jigsaw puzzle pairs are snapping back into place.  
"Yeah. And. Am I…showing it?" He breathes.  
Showing what no mazoku is allowed to speak without penalty of death. The forbidden words: that he loves her. Oh. He has no idea how much he is showing it. She's amazed at how a creature as wise as him can be so naïve about certain things.  
"Yes. Oh, sweetie. Yes. You are, you have, you always do. That was my mistake in this. Even Zelgadiss noticed that." She tugs him upright. They stand together, arm in arm, covered in mud, walking through the garden, marveling at the lumps of soil that will bear all kinds of green and new and exciting things. Marveling at how there can always be something new for two such as them to look forward to. "…Hey, Xellos."  
"Yeah, honey?" He's cracking his neck, and shaking the dirt and seeds out of his horribly short adorable hair.  
She restrains herself from kissing his beautiful neck again in order to convey something very important. "I've decided on my favorite color."  
"…oh yeah?"  
"Yeah. Want to hear?"  
"I await with bated breath, dearest."  
"Pink…"  
He groans. "Listen, Filly, I…"  
"_And_ blue. Both of them."  
"….Oooohhh."  
"Think you can work with that?" She lays her head on his chest as they walk. They aren't in robotic, cloned step. She even steps on his toes a couple of times. But their pace is identical. Harmonious. A perfect match. "Think _we_ can work with that?"  
Xellos chuckles, a deep, and rumbling, and delighted sound, and it climbs higher and higher until it is like bubbles in a sparkling champagne glass.  
A sound, in its own way, of quiet rejoicing.  
Of compromise and trust, for the one we put first, even before ourselves.  
"Oh, yes. We can work with that."  
He kisses her forehead, and smiles.  
And the smile has dimples.


End file.
